Main navigation

Which word processors support Rich Text in Dark Mode?

For some days now, the App Store has been promoting various apps, particularly what it terms “writing apps” which “revel in Dark Mode”. Although several of these are specialist products, I thought it would only be appropriate to see which of them and other major ‘word processors’ do fully support Dark Mode at present.

One very important issue here is which you can rely on to create styled text (Rich Text) for use elsewhere. For example, if you want to compose a Secure Note to store in your keychain.

Like other apps built on macOS’s TextKit, Keychain Access is sensitive to the styling of text which you paste into it. TextKit supports two types of colour styling: bimodal, which it displays correctly in both Light and Dark Mode, and unimodal, which doesn’t change colour with appearance mode. If you mistakenly use black unimodal text, it will vanish when you view it in Dark Mode; if you use bimodal text instead, it will be shown as black on a white background in Light Mode, and white on a black background in Dark Mode, which is what you want.

Among the apps which the App Store lists as revelling in Dark Mode is Apple’s own Pages, currently in version 7.3. It doesn’t support ‘full Dark Mode’ which changes the text background, so you can’t preview your work. If you copy from Pages and paste into any app using TextKit, the text is set in unimodal black, and there’s no way to change that. The same happens if you open a Rich Text file exported from Pages. Even worse, if you paste in text from another app which does create bimodal styled text, Pages switches it to unimodal black.

Pages 7.3 therefore doesn’t support TextKit’s tools to cope with Dark Mode. It doesn’t “revel in Dark Mode”, but falls apart and is incompatible with Rich Text in Dark Mode.

Microsoft Word 16.19 doesn’t, by Microsoft’s own admission, support Dark Mode, but it’s promised in a future release. It too fails to generate or handle styled text in an bimodal way, although it does at least display bimodal text pasted into it correctly. Try to use it to create bimodal text, though, and it’s no better than Pages.

Nisus Writer Pro 3.0 is my favourite word processor, which I use to generate the PDF documentation for all my apps. Sadly, it performs no better than Microsoft Word: it can’t generate bimodal text either to copy and paste, or in an RTF file, but it does at least display pasted-in bimodal text correctly.

I have previously slated Apple’s bundled TextEdit in Mojave 10.14.2, and despite its Dark Appearance for windows, it too works primarily in unimodal black text. Copy from it and paste into a TextKit-based app and all you will get is fixed black letters, and it writes RTF files in the same unimodal way too. Like Nisus Writer Pro and Microsoft Word, it does at least respect bimodal text when it is pasted into a document, though, and that is retained in the RTF files which it writes.

My own DelightEd, as you’d expect, uses TextKit to handle its styled text, and is currently the only Rich Text editor that I have which fully supports and preserves bimodal text.

Six months after Apple explained how to support bimodal text in Mojave, at WWDC, this is appalling. Although Dark Mode is a minority appearance, for the App Store to be promoting products which don’t comply with the guidelines Apple laid down back in June is surely misleading users, and only going to make their problems worse.

My conclusion: don’t trust “writing apps” or word processors which claim to “revel in Dark Mode”. They almost certainly don’t. If you want your Rich Text to be readable in both appearance modes, you know what to create it in, it’s in Downloads above.

7Comments

Microsoft Office was updated yesterday to version 16.20.0, which now also supports Dark Mode. But I haven’t tested the bimodal thing yet. At any rate, the page itself on which you write, stays white in the new MS Word update, so it doesn’t seem to be “full dark mode” anyway.

Thank you, Joss. I have just updated and confirm that all this does at present is put the window furniture into Dark Mode. Its page display (in any edit mode) remains bright white, and its behaviour remains as described above.
It has take Microsoft six months to work that out? Really?
Howard.

This is as Apple described in their presentations. Dark Mode’s purpose isn’t to turn everything dark, but to de-emphasize the UI, in order to draw your focus to the document you’re working on.

So it makes perfect sense for a word processor to make everything but the document dark. The document going dark would undermine the point, since there would be nothing to draw your attention to it. It would also violate WYSIWYG principles since most people print on white paper.

Just out of curiosity, what happens if you switch to a draft-mode view? That view has no pretense of WYSIWYG, so one could justify the background going dark in that mode.

Thank you.
Do you work in Dark Mode all the time? Have you experienced the dazzle – I call it the Flashlight Effect – when you open a document in one of the half-Dark apps? Have you worked in a fully Dark Mode environment, such as those provided when editing source code in Xcode or most other text editors now? Why is this apparently essential for text editors, but not for Rich Text and other documents?
I think you mentioned the concept of printing on white paper. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I thought that we were getting away from printing stuff out now?
And Microsoft Word shows black text on white no matter which mode you switch it to.
You don’t have to justify conforming with an appearance. You should justify all but ignoring it. Really, what is the point of only changing the window furniture?
You also refer, I presume, to the WWDC presentations. I don’t recall either of them demonstrating this type of appearance, nor saying that it was cool or expected. All the demos that I recall showed fully-darkened apps.
Howard.

To add to the blacklist of Apple-made apps that doesn’t fully support Dark Mode in Mojave, i realized that even the most recent version of Apple Compressor uses non standard file open window, which flashes into my face. Firstly, it has been about three months since the release of Mojave, secondly, to add to the injury, Compressor itself was skinned dark even way before Mojave. So why, why.

Screenshot of browsing for a while from inside Compressor while in Dark Mode:

Thank you. I think that Compressor is being hurried a bit to get it up to full 64-bit compliance and fix other issues. It clearly needs more work on the interface still, although none of this is actually that difficult.
Howard.